Log

The US is a thalassocratic mercantile empire superimposed onto a continental tellurocracy... a Carthage on top of a Rome. ... the two intersect in Washington, more precisely at the money printer. The thalassocratic US empire of the 20th century is locked in a constant struggle to dominate the tellurocratic US empire of the 19th, and its chief weapon in this struggle is control over the money supply. There is little that maps onto the left/right discourse in these United States today as cleanly as the class interests of the American interior, largely white “heritage Americans,” against the class interests of those cosmopolitans who sit by the money printer and experience more alignment with their counterparts in London or Hong Kong, along with their stitched-together coalition of client groups bribed into alliance using the run-off from the printer, than with the bulk of their own countrymen. https://substack.com/home/post/p-179603373

" Nos Hercules et Achilles non sumus, sed imbelles et minime ad bella nati. " (We are not Hercules or Achilles, but un-warlike and by no means born for war.) - Antonio de Ferraris (Antonius Galateus, fl. late 15th–early 16th) saw his city of Otranto fall in 1480 to the Turks. In the 1520s, Algeria falls to the famed pirate Redbeard and under the rule of the Turkish sultan. Rhodes follows suit, after centuries of being governed and defended by the Knights of St. John. Feeling no particular sympathy for the Spanish, De Ferraris nonetheless sees that Italy has very few options left. It is rich and too close to the Turks. It either falls to the Turks - which means slavery and degradation, or it allows itself to be defended by those willing to do so - the Spanish. The peninsula is divided politically and not ready for war.

We won't even see the next era of business coming. One day it will just appear. We look backwards for inspiration. Forwards for escape. Recently, I was inspired by an answer from Roman Mars of 99% invisible to the question "which design hill would you die on?" His response: "efficiency makes society worse." All our attempts to carve the perfect process leave us with hyper-efficient, but inhuman monoliths. People, the real elements of society, get left by the side of the road. Valencia's Juan Roig, well-known for his entrepreneurship, had a similar response to the Classic American Capitalist perspective that calls for endless streamlining working towards the capitalist ideal of running a billion-dollar company with a single employee. Roig's approach was instead: maximum employment. The highest good is the highest engagement with society. Is it efficient? No. Is it human? Very much yes. I would like to see business become more human.

If you rank programming languages by usage outside of devs, the top languages all have a table-ish metaphor (SQL, Excel, R, Matlab). The languages devs use are largely Algol derived. Algol is a language that was used to express algorithms, which were largely abstractions over Turing machines, which are based around an infinite 1D tape of memory. This model of 1D memory was built into early computers, and early operating systems and early languages. We call it "mechanical sympathy". Meanwhile, other languages at the same time were invented that weren't tied so closely to the machine, but were more for the purpose of doing science and math. They didn't care as much about this 1D view of the world. Early languages like Fortran and Matlab had notions of 2D data matrices because math and science had notions of 2D data matrices. Languages like C were happy to support these things by using an array of pointers. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46052064

"Today, if you don’t want to build your own ledger, you do have a few options. For example, there are hosted services like Modern Treasury and ledger-specific databases like TigerBeetle. Both of these are impressive and probably a good fit for many. But by using a ledger outside of the main application database, you lose transactionality and atomicity. Namely, you have to worry about orchestrating two systems that can fail independently. What happens if you write your main data, but the ledger update fails? Or the ledger operation succeeds but your app hits an error and fails to write the surrounding data. Integrating with these often requires two-phase commits and other strategies to ensure they stay in sync. And when they fall out of sync, it can be very hard to debug." https://www.pgrs.net/2025/03/24/pgledger-ledger-implementation-in-postgresql